1. Field
The present invention relates generally to billing for telephone calls made from cellular telephones, and more specifically to separable billing for business and personal calls from cellular telephones.
2. Background
Many businesses provide cellular telephones to employees and other affiliates associated with the business. Such telephones may be provided in order to be able to contact the employees in the event of an emergency or other situation needing the immediate attention of the employee, or may be provided to give the employee a means to contact people that the employee needs to contact on a routine basis while away from a traditional land line. For example, a large company may provide cellular telephones to relatively high level employees, such as employees having a certain level or grade within the company and higher. For example, a large company may provide telephones to employees having the title of vice president or higher, or such companies may provide telephones to sales and marketing personnel who may spend significant portions of the day away from the job site while at customer meetings, etc. In many such cases, the business pays for the cellular telephone and pays for all calls made on such a cellular telephone.
When paying for cellular telephones provided to employees, the business generally pays for all calls made on the cellular telephone, both business calls and personal calls. In many cases, companies enter into a contract with a carrier in which the company is sold a bundle of airtime for a preset time period, such as 1,000 minutes for one month. The cumulative use of all of the cellular telephones of the business is then charged against the airtime, and any airtime over the preset limit is billed on a per minute, or other increment, above the preset limit. Often, businesses are aware that the employees having such cellular telephones place both personal calls and business calls using this telephone, and accept this as a reasonable personal use. In the event that an employee is abusing their calling privileges, such an abuse may be detected based upon a review of the bill from the carrier, and in the event of an abase the individual employee may be requested to discontinue such use and/or pay for a portion of their use. Typically, however, if such phones are provided only to relatively high level employees, such abuses are relatively uncommon.
The cellular telephones that a business may provide to various employees are generally relatively inexpensive if purchased along with an airtime plan from a carrier. Due to the relative low costs of such phones, often times businesses would like to provide such cellular telephones to a broader range of employees. However, a significant cost of such airtime plans is the expected or past airtime usage. If a company were confident that it were only paying for airtime related to business related telephone calls, the company may negotiate a contract which has lower airtime per month and thus a significantly lower cost per month. In order to maintain such costs, however, the business must be comfortable that the airtime will exceed the monthly allotment in relatively rare cases. However, when considering whether to provide such cellular telephones to a wider range of employees, the business may decide not to provide the cellular telephones because the business is not confident that the broader range of employees will refrain from significant personal use of the cellular telephones, thus incurring expenses for additional airtime use. There is therefore a need in the art for providing separable billing for cellular telephones in order to keep business airtime at an expected level while also, providing cellular telephones to a broader range of employees with confidence that airtime usage will exceed negotiated airtime allotments only in rare instances.